Gilbert Sorrentino, *The Moon
In Its Flight*, Coffee House, 2004
'Consider the young, reasonably
well-mannered men who killed so
many people on September 11th.
There they are, as unremarkable,
as sadly ordinary as any representative
American one can conjure up..."

"To borrow a phrase which was often used
in your day, we should not consider life
worth living if we had to be surrounded by a
population of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly
uncultivated men and women..."

"Certainly Nazi society seems strangely
prophetic of our own-- the same maximizing
of violence and sensation, the same alphabets
of unreason and the fictionalizing of experience."
(JG Ballard, from *Alphabets of Unreason*; first'
published in 1969)

Paul West, *The Immensity of the Here
and Now: a novel of 9.11* (Voyant, 2003)
"When I at last lose consciousness, it will
not be to regain it...I am a haunted man,
victim of appalling dreams, both night
and day variety."

Paul Levinson, *The Pixel Eye* (Tor, 2003)
"A cold November wind stalked Central Park....
In the past 24 hours I'd been propositioned
by a hologram working literally underground
for the feds, and a make=believe scientist
who said she really worked for some *uber*
ACLU."

Alberto Moravia, *Contempt*, translated
by Angus Davidson, (New York Review Books,
1999) "'Well, Freud will serve us as a guide
through this interior landscape of Ulysses,
not Berard with his maps and his philology
which explains nothing...'"